June 10, 2015

Well, we have officially been a family of 4 for nearly 6 weeks now and it has been a crazy ride so far. Things will balance out soon, but let me tell you what we have been through in the past 6 weeks...

Graham was born on May Day, at 12:30am after we had been taking our time doing a few more natural induction techniques on and off since 8am the day previous. I started out with citatech (sp?) in the morning which helped put my body into labor for a few hours during which time Brandan and I roamed the hallways at the hospital, chatting with his many co-workers and sipping juice and enjoying strolling without kids, arm-in-arm! I can't even remember the last time we'd been able to do that. I only dilated a bit after a while so my water was manually broken around noon and stronger contractions hit, dilating me a bit more. After several hours however, my contractions were strong but not able to progress things along any farther, so we opted for an epidural and pitocin. However, after only about 20 minutes on pitocin, baby's heart rate was going crazy and my nausea was overwhelming, so our awesome nurse shut it off and let me sleep for a couple more hours to see if my body would kick into gear. Well, it worked great because at midnight I woke up and rolled over to the side of the bed where I threw up and realized a baby was trying to come out! Graham was born a half hour later with no complications. He was just an angel of a baby! Hardly cried or even wimpered from the moment he arrived, slept almost the entire time we were in the hospital and for the next few weeks after, and nursed really easily. He was and is absolutely adorable and we couldn't be happier to be his mom, pop, and older sister! Kaiya loves him and is always right by his side to put in his binky, pat his back gently, or soothingly tell him "it's ok baby brother, it's ok" as soon as he begins to fuss.

So after the first week of life, we realized that Graham constantly had rotten egg smelling gas and stools and was incredibly gassy, even though he wasn't fussing. This was the first sign Kaiya gave us of her lactose issues before her acidic diaper rash began, so we preemptively cut out lactose from my diet and he quickly became a normal, yummy smelling baby! My poor sensitive babies... so we had the lactose issue taken care of, but Graham also had another sensitivity issue that was about to ensue.

At Graham's 3 week mark, I became incredibly sick and ended up in the hospital for two days with fluids and several IV antibiotics treating a postpartum infection. It was undetermined how I even got the infection (which irks me a bit...) or how it had taken three weeks for it to spring into full gear and overtake my body. In retrospect, it's now easy to see the random headaches, body temperature regulation issues, physical recovery, extreme tiredness, and other weird symptoms and how they were all due to the infection. Of course when you are recovering from having a baby, you just feel tired and crappy anyway so any other weird symptoms you just kind of ignore. Anyway, the infection was bad enough that I was nearly septic when I arrived at the ER (SO grateful we went in when we did, or things would have turned out very badly for our little family...!) and I could barely function enough to use the bathroom and take my pills for the next week. Brandan had to take off work to take care of me and the kids, our friends and the ward helped provide us with meals and babysitting, and slowly but surely I could function enough to be somewhat mobile and actually carry my baby again. It took about two weeks to fully recover and I actually am just now beginning to feel back to myself, about 6 weeks postpartum. Talk about a long recovery process, oh my goodness! So back to Graham's sensitivity - he had issues with my antibiotics so we had to give him soy formula for over a week which made him super constipated and have a pretty bad acne breakout. So we were dealing with me recovering physically, trying to pump every few hours day and night and storing it, treating Graham's intestinal issues, and even an illness that Kaiya caught all at the same time.

But we are all back to normal functioning now - thank goodness! I am back to not being exhausted 24/7 and nursing Graham full time, Kaiya's post-viral rash is disappearing, Brandan is able to go to work each day without worrying about me being able to take care of our kids, and we are able to be out and about once again. Luckily, all of our recoveries were nearly done for Graham's baby blessing weekend when a lot of Brandan's family was in town so we could enjoy doing some fun things while they were all here :).

[May Day!]

[Graham's eyes were wide open for the first hour or two of life before the week-long sleep began!]

[Who wouldn't be stoked to have this baby added to their family?]

[Bonding with Daddy]

[Kaiya thought it was pretty fun comparing baby Graham to her baby dolls]

[Love!]

[Little stud]

[I could watch Graham sleep all day]

[Handsome little guy - I can't believe how quickly his hair went from brunette to blonde!]

[The great men who participated in blessing Graham :)]

[Blessing Day!]

[Thank goodness for etsy and people who use it to sell desperate people like me adorable outfits!]

[The family who were all here for the blessing weekend :) we had a lot of fun together.]

[It's a definite tie between my love for Brandan and this new little man in my life ;)]

About Me

We were married in the winter of 2010 and are so excited about everything that we get to go through and accomplish together. We've both graduated from BYU-I with degress in Exercise Physiology and are in the process of getting through graduate school and adding to our little family. We love being adventuresome and hardly ever miss up a chance at participating in, eating, or seeing something new and different.